American Gothic by Michael Romkey

tell, is a vampire?”
    “We can discuss that another time, General.”
    “Will there be another time?”
    She indicated his glass. “Have your drink. It will relax you.”
    The last thing Peregrine wanted to do was relax, but he picked up the cognac. The vampire nodded as he drank, like a physician happy to see her patient taking his medicine.
    “The thing that fascinates me about you is not your fearlessness, which is remarkable in itself. What makes you unique, General, is your inability to free yourself from your grief. I have known people suffering the horrors of tragedy and loss, but I have never witnessed grief as profound and deep as I see it in you.” She closed her eyes. “I can feel it burning in you—your grief, and your anger.”
    Peregrine locked his jaw and looked away, blinking his eyes rapidly. He wished she would get it over with—sink her teeth into his neck, kill him, and put the whole pathetic tragedy that was his life forever in the past.
    “Emotions are like coins, General, with two sides, heads and tails, opposing representations of what is in fact the same whole. Surely you have noticed that the world is made up of dualities: day and night; white and black; inside and out; love and hate; good and evil.”
    Peregrine was hardly listening. Madame Allard had summoned the ghosts back into the center of his world.
    “Every emotion, every power, has its opposite, and that is where it draws its true power. The converse of grief is not joy but vengeance. Grief and anger are waters that well up out of the same dark place in your ruined heart.”
    Peregrine felt himself fall bodily back into the present moment. He looked back at Madame Allard. The hard light in her eyes reflected nothing but cold calculation and a desire to have her way—whatever she was up to with him. Few men could be as cruel as a beautiful woman, in Peregrine’s experience; they grew so accustomed to breaking hearts that they often became hardened to anything but their own desire.
    “It is just a question of translation, General. The solution to the pain over your murdered family is not to suffer but to convert the misery into hatred. You have an exquisite untouched capacity for anger. It is a gift, my dear, a talent every bit as rare and precious as what my remarkable friend Liszt is able to do when he sits at my piano downstairs. You have been blessed. The seed that flowers into genius is invariably a wound, and you, my poor dear man, have been wounded to the bottom of your heart. Cradle your lust for vengeance, Nathaniel. Hold it to your breast like a child, like you held your own two poor dead children when they were babies. You can make so many interesting things happen if you devote your mind, your body, and your soul to gorgeous anger. What you want is not oblivion but revenge on the people who killed your wife and children.”
    Peregrine stared, too stunned to speak, barely able to breathe. He closed his eyes and felt it, the anger, burning hot as a blacksmith’s fire in his soul.
    “Since there is no love in your life, replace it with hate, Nathaniel. We need something inside, something to give us a reason to continue from day to day. You are a hollow man now, but I can see that changing as I watch you fill your soul with pure and glorious anger.”
    A bead of perspiration ran down the side of his face, but he did not bother to wipe it away.
    “Never have I met a man more marked for doom than you, Nathaniel Peregrine,” she said, her voice seeming to come from within him. “Not marked for death, my love,” she whispered, her lips now gently brushing his neck, “but doom.”
    Peregrine started to ask Madame Allard what she meant, but the feeling of her breath against the skin of his neck, so deliciously warm and moist, stopped the words in his mouth.
    “The people who murdered your beloved wife and your babies will be made to pay, my darling,” she whispered. “Vengeance
will
be yours. That is my promise to